Shirley E. Lovely, 96, of Columbus, NC, died Tuesday, April 25, 2017 in Tryon Estates.Born in Peoria, IL, on May 24, 1920, she was the daughter of Albert H. and Edna E. Ernsberger. Shirley attended Peoria public schools and Bradley University of the same city, and later obtained her BA from George Washington University. She joined the class in Medical Technology at St, Francis Hospital in 1942, and passed the registry examination American Society of Clinical Pathologists (ASCP) in 1943.She worked for a short time at St. Francis Hospital and resigned to marry Jack Beaumont Pfeiffer, September 12, 1943, whom she met when they were students at Bradley. She worked for the US Department of Agriculture, in Peoria, on the vitamin research project at the Northern Regional Laboratory from 1943 to 1948, moving to Stillwater, OK with her husband, who had accepted a position as Asst. Professor at Oklahoma A&M. They left in 1951 to live in Fairfax County, Virginia, where she obtained a job at the Bureau of Agricultural Research at the USDA in Washington, DC.In 1954, their first child arrived. She stopped working to raise four children: William G. Pfeiffer, Patricia Pfeiffer Sizemore, John A. Pfeiffer, and Kathryn Pfeiffer Gross.While living in Virginia, she served on various boards and commissions on the local, state, and national level including: State Board of the League of Women Voters, the Mental Health and Retardation Services Board, the Taxicab License Review Board of Fairfax County, the State Commission for the Tax Assessment of Farmland, and the Board of the East-West Center in Hawaii for the State Department.She returned to the work force in 1976, passed the ASCP registry for Specialist in Microbiology, and became the supervisor of the microbiology department at Mt. Vernon Hospital until retiring in 1987.She and her husband moved to Tryon Estates Retirement Community in Columbus, NC in 1995 where Jack Pfeiffer died in 1997.She met John Whittemore Lovely at Tryon Estates, and they married in 1997, and she was widowed in 2004. There are five surviving step children: Thomas C. Lovely, Peter S. Lovely, Charles E. Lovely, Candace W. Lovely, and Roderick K. Lovely.She is also survived by seven grandchildren: Celeste and Leigh Pfeiffer, Austin, Chelsea, and Corbin Gross, and Michelle and Michael Pfeiffer.
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